] ] 2015: The PDP’s desperate campaign
Was someone flying a kite, or was it just another silly political joke? Whatever it may have been, it was certainly not funny. It was, in fact, in bad taste, and since the news of the affront broke it is pleasing to see that the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Media Affairs, Doyin Okupe, has at least put out a statement to discredit the report carried in the social media and a fewer national dailies over the weekend to the effect that the presidency had no intention of handing over to the APC Presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari, even if he wins next month’s presidential elections fairly.
The same report claimed that rather than concede defeat, the presidency would rather handover to the military and damn the consequences! Buhari, the statement concluded, will never be allowed to become the president of Nigeria ever again.
Quite inevitably, the statement said to have been posted on the Facebook account of an aide to Okupe, provoked various reactions from concerned Nigerians. It in fact, unearthed many ghosts. The first ghost to be reawakened was that of the June 12, 1993 elections and all its ramifications.
It was certainly the day Nigerians thought they had experienced the freest presidential election in their history, only to have it annulled by the regime of the then military president General Ibrahim Babangida.
Even before the provocative statement went viral in the social media, there were quite rumours that annulling the 2015 presidential elections was one of the options on the table of the presidency if the PDP loses.
The difference - if they actually attempt to annul the election, that is - is that as whereas in 1993 General Babangida acted with the comportment of expected from the leader of an un-elected military junta, President Jonathan will be hard pressed to explain to the Nigerian masses and the entire world why he chose to act in breach of the same constitution he depended upon to catapult himself into the Aso Rock Villa. His excuses, if at all he could summon the courage to enumerate any, will be fewer and less convincing to anyone except the tiny cycle of leeches that surround and have become notorious for missadvising him.
The second familiar ghost the discredited statement from Okupe’s Office exorcised was the spectre of another Interim National Government (ING) much like the short-lived tenure of the contraption headed by Ernest Shonekan after General Babangida finally stepped aside in 1993.
And that is because if the PDP administration loses and decides to hand over to the military, the gesture will only amount to a stop-gap measure largely because Nigerians, and indeed the rest of the world will not stand for it.
The African Union in particular now has a well established protocol against military interventions in the democratic affairs of its member states. The entire world had become wary of military juntas. There is a world-wide revulsion against military regimes. They have become relics of the past and are no longer fashionable. Therefore, any suggested handover to a military junta will not wash. And even if they succeed in doing so the military regime will be living on borrowed time from day one.
That ultimately brings me to the question of why any reasonably thinking man will even suggest that option. The only answer, because every other option is disqualified by uncommon logic, is desperation. And as the February elections looms ever closer, it is becoming increasingly clear that the PDP cannot campaign and win the elections by debating issues and has resorted to attacking the personality of the leading candidate from the opposition in the person of General Muhammadu Buhari.
It started with the failed idiotic attempts to discredit his academic qualifications on the basis of which the general contested the last two presidential elections. When that failed to gain the desired traction, the PDP invested heavily in full-page newspaper adverts that depicted Buhari in the toga of an unrepentant religious fundamentalist who is merely bidding time to “Islamize’’ Nigeria.
Well, that option too, is apparently failing for obvious reasons, but not for want of trying. In recent days, the strategy is to depict Buhari as an unfit candidate for the office of the presidency. The level of desperation is such that PDP has even been accused of presenting forged documents from the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital to prove that Buhari has prostate cancer!
The tragic reality in
its desperate campaign strategy these days is that the PDP has even failed to score own goals in its vile and uncouth attempt to assassinate the character of Buhari. Much of its has to do with President Jonathan’s sordid record in office, but an even greater factor concerns the individuals he has chosen to run the campaign for him and no one has put that more succinctly than the than the Lagos based lawyer Festus Keyamo, whom I have taken the liberty to quote generously from:
“We have a President who has no single appetite to fight corruption - yes, none. Imagine a campaign that is dominated by the theme of corruption, yet the President has decided to appoint a person facing trial for moneylaundering as his Director of Media and Publicity. If nobody would say it, I will say it because I am the one prosecuting the fellow in court and the case has been adjourned to February 23 and 24 for trial. Part of the lies told is that the fellow has been freed whereas some of the counts in the Charge were just struck out and the court held that he has a case to answer on some other counts. Yet nobody is asking the President these hard questions.”
With people such as FemiFani Kayode orchestrating Jonathan’s presidential campaign, it is perhaps not surprising that rational Nigerians are beginning to doubt the sanity and substance in their choice of tactics. The obvious truth, in case anyone is prepared to digest same, is that there seems to be a sobering realization in the PDP that the president cannot run on his sordid record and expect to win, hence the recourse to negative tactics. Here, again, Keyamo provides a helping hand:
“The orchestration of the age of Buhari is just another mischief, symptomatic of the weaker side the President’s team find themselves in the argument. Agility and strength and good health is not exactly a function of age. Yar’Adua did not die in power because he was an old man. Abacha did not die in power because he was an old man. Obasanjo ruled until he was seventy (70) years and it is the same set of PDP big wigs that are now criticizing the age of Buhari that were promoting and supporting the third-term bid of Obasanjo that would have taken him to, perhaps, seventy-eight (78) years as President.”
But by far the most nauseating PDP campaign of the lot was what amounted to a death wish on Buhari by the Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose. In front page adverts carried by some national dailies yesterday, Fayose not only warned Nigerians to be wary of Buhari’s alleged ill-health, but actually predicted that the General will not live to be 75 years old in a subsequent interview on Ekiti state television.